From point-of-sale systems and eCommerce platforms to inventory management and personalized experiences, the database is a crucial component of retailers’ backend infrastructure. Yet, it’s often the leading cause of slow checkouts, stock inaccuracies, and website downtime.
To meet modern shopper expectations, retail applications need a database that can handle high traffic spikes, scale seamlessly across regions, ensure real-time inventory accuracy, and support personalized experiences. That’s why leading retailers are modernizing their infrastructure with distributed SQL databases.
The team at Cockroach Labs has worked with dozens of companies (including Fortune 50 retailers) that use CockroachDB in production today. Here’s three customer stories describing how they use CockroachDB to support mission-critical use cases.
Retailer #1: Accurate inventory management 
Managing inventory is a major challenge for retailers (online and in-person), especially when real-time accuracy is essential. With inventory constantly changing, retailers need a scalable system that ensures data consistency at all times. For larger operations, this is critical to preventing overselling, which can lead to financial losses and harm customer trust.
One of the world’s largest online marketplaces and logistics companies consistently encounters several situations that may affect inventory levels including: items expiring, items that are damaged, items that are sent and are different than what is ordered.
After an inventory update is made in their database, failing to sync accurate stock levels across all systems in real-time can lead to both over-selling (item appears in stock but is unavailable) and under-buying (when replenished inventory isn’t updated on the platform so customers do not know it’s available), negatively impacting customer experience and business performance.
A straightforward way to propagate inventory changes across the system would be to trigger service code actions whenever the inventory table is updated. However, this method is difficult to maintain and prone to errors, as multiple code paths can impact inventory levels. Additionally, it tightly couples inventory updates with their downstream effects, making the system more complex.
RELATED: How to build an inventory management system that scales (with reference architecture)
Solution: Built-in changefeeds
Instead, to address these challenges, the company leverages CockroachDB’s built-in changefeeds to capture inventory updates and send them to Kafka, which then initiates workflows to handle necessary tasks. This approach ensures fault tolerance, near real-time processing, and horizontal scalability, while also improving maintainability by clearly separating concerns and introducing layers of abstraction.
Retailer #2: Reliable payment systems
When it comes to payment and billing systems, not only is availability crucial, but organizations also want to easily scale and build data correctness into the system to ensure they never process a transaction twice.
One popular US-based retailer built a majority of their applications and services on PostgreSQL and has data centers distributed around the country. While PostgreSQL is a powerful, reliable relational database, it also has some limitations: manual sharding, downtime for maintenance, active/passive setup, and limited writes. These shortcomings introduced too much risk for the retailer to build a new payment system.
Solution: Out of the box availability
Instead, with CockroachDB, the organization was able to meet their performance requirements for their new payment application with a distributed SQL foundation. They take advantage of rolling upgrades and online schema changes so there's no need to take the database down for maintenance. CockroachDB has built-in replication with the ability to distribute data across geographies while still guaranteeing data correctness. And since it is a fully distributed database and every node accepts reads and writes, performance bottlenecks are not an issue.
Today, the company runs CockroachDB across multiple regions and relies on the database to intelligently spread out incoming data. The system achieves 99.999% availability while processing millions of transactions per day.
RELATED: How to build a payments system that scales to infinity (with examples)
Retailer #3: Scalable eCommerce
As online shopping continues to grow, fraudsters are increasingly targeting eCommerce platforms to exploit vulnerabilities. Without proper fraud prevention measures in place, retailers risk financial losses, reputational damage, and customer trust issues.
One eCommerce business that operates globally and specializes in fraud prevention reviews billions of dollars in gross merchandise value for their retail clients each year. Prior to using CockroachDB the company had a complex tech stack which included several databases such as Aurora PostgreSQL and RDS.
The key limitation that spurred the search for a new solution is common in legacy relational databases: a single writer. Since all writes were served by a single instance, there was a limit on the number of transactions that could be received per second. This issue primarily affected the company's eCommerce verification application which is central to their platform. CockroachDB eliminates the single-writer issue because it can write (and read) from any node in the cluster.
Solution: Performance at scale
As a result, the company decided to put CockroachDB and other databases through a rigorous proof of concept, which included testing different environments, loading in half of the production data, and bombarding the database with queries. The team was impressed with CockroachDB’s ability to seamlessly scale up and back down and remove performance bottlenecks. After a zero downtime migration, they report that their infrastructure is now elastic and allows them to easily adapt to changes in demand.
CockroachDB for retail & eCommerce
This blog summarizes top ways retailers are using CockroachDB today. You can visit our customer page to read more stories, or get in touch with an expert to see how CockroachDB can help your organization.
